Quotes of the Day

– State Superintendent of Education Joy Hofmeister, speaking at a Sand Springs Parent Action and Advocacy Team meeting (Source)

“I think it’s irresponsible. We tried this in the late 1990s. We set up (Medicaid) HMOs throughout Oklahoma, and it failed. Why would we repeat that mistake?”

-Trish Emig, a board member of the Oklahoma Alliance on Aging, speaking about Oklahoma lawmakers’ attempt to move aged, blind and disabled Medicaid patients into a privatized managed-care program (Source)

“If there’s a need out there, you want to be meeting it. To that end, growth is a good thing, but we’d like to see the need shrinking.”

– Eileen Bradshaw, Executive Director of the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma, on the tenth year of the food bank’s Food for Kids backpack program, which sends home a backpack of additional food for food-insecure students over the weekend. The program, which reached 500 students per week when it began, served about 7,000 students per week at the end of the 2014-2015 school year (Source)

While [Affordable Care Act] taxes are being enforced in Oklahoma, the state has refused billions of dollars in ACA funding to extend Medicaid coverage to the state’s poorest people. Some 127,000 insured Oklahomans — enough to knock the state’s uninsured percentage down near 12 percent — could be eligible for expanded Medicaid. … Refusing the federal funding is foolish. It keeps Oklahoma physically and economically sick in defiance of a political battle that was lost long ago.

-Tulsa World Editorial Board (Source)

“They’re there — you have to see the children you used to have in your class. They look up to you. You’re a model of hope of what a college degree can get you.”

-Emerson Elementary teacher Virginia Ayers, speaking about why she is ashamed to seek out help from a food pantry even though Oklahoma’s low teacher pay frequently leaves her unable to afford enough food (Source)

“Our state leaders know that current education funding levels are insufficient to provide appropriate services to students. In order to offer flexibility to local schools to address this state-imposed financial crisis, our legislature has voted to maintain a suspension on class size requirements, the requirement to purchase textbooks, and the requirement to make library and media expenditures at our local schools. … While the flexibility has been needed, the result is that we are now in the sixth year of this moratorium and all Oklahoma students from the 5th grade down have experienced nothing but funding cuts, overcrowded classrooms, and fewer courses while in Oklahoma’s public schools.”

-Ryan Owens and Steven Crawford, co-executive directors of the Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration (Source)

“I hear Tulsans saying it’s time to weigh the cost of building a robust transit system against the cost and disadvantages we create for ourselves by not offering one. Millennials in Tulsa postponing home buying while having no option to rid themselves of car expenses are passionate in their support of public transit as are older citizens facing isolation when driving is no longer an option. Employers and employees whose productivity and quality of life are hampered by a transit system whose service runs every 45 minutes, every 90 minutes or not at all on weekends, feel the economic hardship of Tulsa’s system where it hurts the most … in the pocketbook.”

-University of Tulsa Vice President and Gilcrease Museum CEO Susan Neal (Source)

“When you are 1,000 teachers short, you have to think about how that affects our children. We are talking about 25,000 to 30,000 kids without a permanent teacher.”

-Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister, who is calling for the Legislature to raise salaries and reduce testing to combat the state’s growing teacher shortage (Source)

“I’ve always said, whether it’s a female, Hispanic, African-American, is we need that input, because it differs. I don’t think the same way as a female might. I don’t think about those things. I don’t think as an African-American. I don’t think what might affect them, and culturally those things that might affect them.”

– Oklahoma City chief of police Bill Citty, discussing why he views a more diverse police force as a key element to reducing tensions between community and police (Source)

“My anthropologist is in a closet and to lay out a skeleton, he has to come out to a conference room. If attorneys arrive and need to use that conference room, he has to pack up the skeleton and move it back to his office.”

– Amy Elliott, chief administrative officer for the state medical examiner, explaining plans to move the state medical examiner’s office to a new building. The office lost its accreditation due to issues with the current location (Source)